Category: animal

I realized it was a mistake to abandon my daily doodles. It is important for me to do a daily doodle before working on big projects. I helps loosen me up. I will do this every day. I might miss a day here and there but I plan on being consistent

I always set limitations to challenge myself. Here are the the two:

1.I can only work on in for 30 minutes to and 1 hour. Once the timer goes off. I can no longer work on it . This is not speed painting, it’s to teach me to use my time effectively. Also it should help me block in the big stuff first.

2. I have to attempt to draw it in a somewhat realistic style.

What I draw can be anything real or imaginary but I must use refs.

BTW here is the first daily painting. A deer. I spent 30 minutes on this.

Had some time to kill while waiting, so I drew a wyvern on my ipad using the app Procreate. I no longer have a stylus so the last couple ipad sketches I have used my finger. It’s strange drawing with your finger. Time spent 1hr. Software used: Procreate.

More character ideas. I’ve been trying to give each character a little story so they are more interesting. This is a alligator merchandiser.

“There once was a gator merchandiser. He resets the shelves at local stores. He always got stuck with resetting the freezer sections of the store. One day he got stuck in a freezer and froze to death. The end”

Alec is finally completed and is ready. He is a co-protagonist for a comic-animation project. He is a humanoid dragon that lives a modern world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals. This model was made for both animation and as a reference for the comic. I went all the way and made his face very dragon like, removing all the human elements (with the exception of the eyes) such as hair and eyebrows. Gave him a dragon snout. Shrunk his eyes, added many horns, changed the ears to make them more fin like. Added a bone jaw. Curved out his neck and made the connection on the back of the skull (like a reptile) instead of connecting to the bottom of the cranium (like a human). Added the textures to the model. I wanted his face to scream ‘Dragon’ despite being humanoid and having no wings. Originally Alec’s skin color was a golden orange but I changed it to white for two reasons. It’s more readable, and since he’s a dragon which is usually associated with ‘monster’, giving him white scales associates him with ‘good’ since that is what the trope tells us, it kinda a balancing act.

It might seem odd to have a dragon as a main protagonist instead of a villain or loyal steed. There seems to be two stereotypes for dragons in popular media, one is that of a ruthless monster ( usually the main villain) that is usually burning down villages, capturing damsels, and sleeping on bucket loads of treasure (AKA Beowulf, St George). The other stereotype is that a dragon is the equivalent of a loyal pet steed aka “man’s best scaly friend” (AKA How to Train Your Dragon). Alec fits into neither of those stereotypes but has to deal with them on a daily basis. However Alec’s personality is ‘dragon’ like. Most of the humor with be about the stereotypes and cliches in our culture and flipping it on it’s head. For example, the two main protagonists are a dragon and a cheetah, the main villains in the project is a rabbit and a mouse. I intentionally flipped the roles. Why are deceased infested rodents that spreed plague and death considered heroes in popular fiction? Why are lizards and reptiles the bad guys in films, when in real life most reptiles are pretty docile? Why is a domesticated dog character never the villain but there are plenty of villainous domesticated cat characters?

You might of notice that I have had been developing two different dragon characters for two separate unrelated projects. At first they both look very different but as I got better drawing dragons the two characters looks have merged together. The major difference is that Chris is a more traditional western style dragon that walks on all fours. Alec is a humanoid with a dragon’s head and tail.

I’ve also included a turnaround of the model so you can see him at different angles, a some facial expression tests. I was also curious if Alec’s design would allow him to stand on all fours. To my surprise, he can. I could think of some good gags with him doing this. It’s rather odd thing to see. Cruz the Cheetah is next on my list to finish.

The last render is a test pose with Alec sitting. For fun I used my own paintings as decorations for the wall 🙂

I couldn’t sleep. I then remembered that I haven’t painted a portrait yet. This time my friend’s favorite animal. The cheetah. I do like the tear drop patterns on the cheetah’s face. Cheetahs are very beautiful creatures. This painting was created from scratch in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet. I used the flat round brush and the eraser for the entire painting. I think I spent around 30 minutes .

I will be doing portraits of animals for the rest of the week. Today I painted one of my favorite reptiles, the crocodile. I ignored the smudge tool and solely used the flat round brush. I had so much fun painting this that I lost track of time and have no clue how long I spent on it. Painting from scratch in Photoshop using a wacom tablet.

I remembered Wikimedia commons is a great place for public domain and CC photos. Here is the link to the ref photo I used if your interested.

In other news I found 6 of the 7 ‘Nausicaa of the valley of the Wind’ manga graphic novels at a thrift store for the price of one. Hayao Miyazaki’s films had a major impact on me when I was younger and have watched most of his films. But I never seen his comic work before he became a director. I’m not the biggest manga fan but this is wonderful artwork. It’s all black and white with with a spot of halftone but it looks very complex even though it is simple. Wikipedia article here.

I’ve also have a urge to play ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ for some reason after looking at the comics. I have no clue why.